New York City Ballet / New York State Theater, NYC / through February 27, 2005 Christopher Wheeldon’s After the Rain is the new ballet that’s making news in the New York City Ballet’s winter season. One of Wheeldon’s bare-bones works, it’s set to a pair of unrelated short pieces by Arvo Pärt, the Estonian composer given to spare constructions in grave moods who is so appealing to today’s choreographers. Three couples—Wendy Whelan and Jock Soto, Sofiane Sylve and Edwaard Liang, Maria Kowroski and Ask la … [Read more...]

Peter Boal, with the New York City Ballet / New York State Theater, NYC / through February 27, 2005; April 25 - June 26, 2005 At the end of the 2005 spring season, the New York City Ballet’s Peter Boal will retire from the company (and its affiliate, the School of American Ballet, where he has been a leading instructor) to become Artistic Director of Seattle’s Pacific Northwest Ballet. The appointment is undoubtedly good for him at this stage of his career. And it will be good for the Seattle company, which, under the … [Read more...]

Kirov Ballet of the Maryinsky Theatre: Cinderella / Kennedy Center: Opera House, Washington, DC / January 11-16, 2005 At the behest of the Kirov Ballet, Alexei Ratmansky (now head of the Bolshoi Ballet, late of the Royal Danes) took Perrault’s seventeenth-century, definitive text of the fairy tale and Prokofiev’s haunting 1944 score and concocted a Cinderella for our cynical times. In this version of the ballet, it’s taken for granted that everyone in the story but the principal pair is as nasty and self-serving—or … [Read more...]

Savion Glover: Classical Savion / Joyce Theater / January 4-23 2005 Savion Glover is more than the greatest tap dancer of his generation. He's a phenomenon--as a technician, an inventor, and a compelling presence. He's been going from strength to strength since he was, at twelve, the tap dance kid. His latest project, Classical Savion, has him strutting his stuff to music by Vivaldi, Bach, Bartók, and Mendelssohn, with Astor Piazzolla thrown in for seasoning. Then, just in case you were missing tap's more conventional … [Read more...]